How govt let 7.5 crore slip into poverty in one year

The Pew Research Centre released a report [in March 2021]. It said that during the pandemic, India’s poverty has increased and its middle class has shrunk. While pundits can debate the methodology used to arrive at these conclusions, I want to draw your attention to the absence of important data in our country, and the questionable credibility of the data that is released by government agencies. What is alarming is that the government is suspected of suppressing unflattering and inconvenient data and it is increasingly felt that the country’s data systems are subverted by political interference.Pew’s report compared India and China. For our purposes, let us leave China out for a while and look at the Indian numbers. Using World Bank’s projections made last year [2020] and the current situation, Pew concluded that India added 75 million people to the category of poor. In addition, the middle-income category in the country shrunk by 32 million. And over 35 million people from the low-income category were pushed into poverty. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r Viewed from a global perspective, 60% of those who fell into poverty worldwide during the pandemic were people living in India. Of the number of people worldwide who slipped out of the middle-income category, too, 60% were Indian.These are terrifying developments. Because, as it is, even before the pandemic reached India, the country was home to 28% of the global poor. In the UN’s 2019 Human Development Index report—which measures a country’s social and economic development—India ranked 129 out of 189 countries. This was a year before the pandemic, and India had already slipped one rank from the previous year.Now, if we look at the comparison with the Chinese figures in the March 2021 Pew report, we will learn that what happened in India were not inevitable consequences of the pandemic. While India added 75 million to its poor in the first pandemic year, China was able to limit the number to one million people. And while India’s middle-income category shrunk by 32 million, China’s actually grew by 30 million.We should all ask ourselves: Why were we not able to stem this tragic slide of such a large number of people into the hell hole of poverty? When others could, why couldn’t we? The reason, I think, is that we have been in denial. We are reluctant to face up to the reality. Our government was pretending that there was no problem. And by suppressing data, massaging it, the government tried to convince people that all was well—and said so, through messages, advertisements and press handouts in almost all our languages. And in some cases, by not collecting any data at all, it tried to bury its policy-making head in the sand and convince even itself that all was well. ShowBlurbsThis mala fide indifference to data, and its unforgivable suppression means that there can be no evidence-based formulation for a stimulus package and its targeted execution to alleviate the suffering and economic distress caused by the pandemic. Inevitably, the overhyped scattergun package that the government came up with did not come to the rescue of the most vulnerable and needy. It turned out to be an unremarkable and hollow announcement which was soon forgotten. More than the devastation caused by the pandemic, it is this insincerity and callousness of the present Indian government that pushed 75 million people—that’s 7.5 crore people—into penury in a single year. This was a sin, but the government is unrepentant.There is no recent data available from government sources on poverty in India. The last authentic government figures are from the 68th round of the National Sample Survey [NSS] done in 2011-2012. Therefore, we do not know where we stand in terms of the Sustainable Development Goals, the first and foremost of which is elimination of poverty by 2030. ShowBlurbsThe October 2020 World Bank’s biennial report, "Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report", said that their estimate of global poverty was seriously handicapped because of lack of data from India. The seriousness of this indictment is not lost on those who know how to read the subtext in the mild reprimanding language of intergovernmental global organisations.There was a time when India’s statistics and data collection were respected throughout the world for their robust institutional architecture. Not just third-world countries, but the advanced economies too looked to Indian practices in collection, analysis and interpretation of socio-economic data. Yes, there were healthy debates and disagreements over methodologies, but never was the integrity of the process in doubt. Never was its impartiality questioned. Never was the government allowed to interfere. The NSS data release schedule was never dictated by the government. Even raw data was put in the public domain for researchers to verify and analyse. This is no longer the case. India’s data integrity is compromised. ShowBlurbsOn the one hand, tech giants are amassing enormous amounts of our personal data—what we do, what we buy, where we go, what our preferences are. They use this data to grab our attention and to manipulate it. On the other hand, our government doesn’t give us access to data that is vital to our collective lives, so that it can keep us in the dark, keep us confused and thus manipulate the political discourse.Both the State and Capital are working by stealth to construct an economic and political future for us—without our consent. Both need to be combatted.For a meaningful discourse, for a roadmap that that will take us towards prosperity and dignity for all Indians, we need data. Authentic, credible, dependable data, uncontaminated by partisan political considerations. We need clean data. In order for us to banish poverty, we need to first banish data poverty. We need to banish insincerity.Excerpted with permission from The Crooked Timber of New India: Essays on a Republic in Crisis (published by Speaking Tiger)